Country songwriter shares philosophy

Sep. 6, 2013
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Singer-songwriter Chris Gantry, photographed Aug. 20, 2013 in Nashville, Tenn., is a remarkably creative writer who is celebrating his 50th year in Nashville and has written a book about songwriting life. / John Partipillo, The Tennessean

by Peter Cooper, The (Nashville) Tennessean

by Peter Cooper, The (Nashville) Tennessean

Get an entertainment lawyer, get a publishing deal, study the charts to see what's popular, write for the radio market, co-write as often as possible with successful, established writers.

Most aspiring professional songwriters have never talked with Chris Gantry, who came to Nashville in September 1963, fell in with a crew of agitators and renegades, made albums, wrote songs for Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, Glen Campbell (the 1968 hit Dreams of the Everyday Housewife) and others, and became what Country Music Hall of Famer Kris Kristofferson calls "the most consistent, dedicated, creative artist that I have ever known in my life."

Gantry calls cow pie on the suggested drill. He's for stalking vulnerability, for green-lighting insanity, for what he calls "exciting, phantasmal writing," which is not a specialty of the co-writing committees in favor along Music Row.

"Sing that anthem of redemption, of freedom, of love so deep it paralyzes your soul when you hear it," Gantry writes in Gypsy Dreamers in the Alley: Seekers of the Mystical Art of the Song, a book that collects a year's worth of Gantry's Facebook postings on his life and musical philosophies.

"We're tired of your wishy-washy hooks and tag lines, your moronic twists and double-meanings, those sad, pathetic commentaries of self-entitlement, dreary country epithets about tailgate parties and beer, silly, testosteronic love affairs with high school girls."

Yeah, but, that stuff sells, right?

Yes, sometimes.

And not Gantry's point, at all.

"You can sway a civilization with a phrase," Gantry says, sitting in his apartment, across the street from a college that teaches the suggested drill to thousands of entertainment and music business students.

"Kristofferson did that with his songwriting: He learned to put words together in a way that changed things. That's what we strive to do. We want our shadow to fall on the masses and elevate them. We want to change them, molecularly."

Advice from Cash

When Gantry hit town in 1963 - arriving in a Nash Rambler, with a well-earned Brooklyn accent, a suitcase and a guitar - Nashville's young buck songwriters were forming a counterculture. Creativity wasn't about getting along; it was about howling subversion.

He soon fell in with a group of fellow seekers such as Kristofferson, Billy Swan, John Hartford, Shel Silverstein, Donnie Fritts and Vince Matthews, songwriters who were bolstered by support from Cash, songwriting ringleader Mickey Newbury, publisher Bob Beckham and producer Fred Foster.

"Nursery-rhyme-simple verse still ruled the day in country music, but (by 1969) conspicuous exceptions marked by complexity of plot and imaginative characterization had already settled on the record charts," writes Michael Streissguth in Outlaw, a book that chronicles the game-changing musicians of Nashville's 1960s and '70s.

Streissguth cites John Hartford's Gentle on My Mind, Jimmy Webb's Wichita Lineman, Tom T. Hall's Margie's at the Lincoln Park Inn and Gantry's Dreams of the Everyday Housewife as lyrically sophisticated songs that elevated the language of country music.

Musical Nashville then was more Kerouac than corporate, with writers and singers spinning wild tales and congregating at Tootsie's on Lower Broadway, at Wally's Professional Club, the Tally Ho Tavern and Sue Brewer's home, which she called "The Boar's Nest," on Music Row. They'd also gather for all-night song swaps at publishing houses like Tree, Marijohn Wilkin's Buckhorn and Beckham's Combine.

One night, Gantry met his childhood hero, Cash, when Cash was playing pool at the Professional Club. He asked, "What do you have to do to be great, John?"

Cash, cigarette in mouth, told Gantry, "Son, you start out great, then you mess it up by trying to be something you ain't." Cash put his hand to his heart and said, "It's all here, son. Lead with this and not your head and you'll always be great."

That conversation stuck with Gantry, who took it to mean that his job as an artist was to remain staunchly individual, and unerringly vulnerable.

"It's not about success and money and fame; it's about being true to yourself," Gantry says. "If you're driven by the desire to create beautiful works, or at least sincere, honest works, then you should spend your time uncovering that reality. Go into those recesses, those lonely places, and discover who you are. I would have better luck finding that out in a state of loneliness, rather than throwing myself in a room full of writers who can knock out something in 20 minutes that might make a fortune but does nothing for the evolution of soul and spirit."

Right, but the radio charts are filled, and often topped, by songs that don't do much for the evolution of soul and spirit.

Yes.

And not Gantry's point, at all.

"That ain't gonna change the world," he writes in Gypsy Dreamers in the Alley. "What in God's name has happened to you? Are you afraid to sit in a seedy motel room for a couple weeks by yourself with your own sensibilities, and find out who you really are? Is that scary to you? I thought you became a songwriter because you loved it; because you wanted to make a difference. Why are you selling it out for the short-end money?"

Gantry knows that aspiring professional songwriters just read that last sentence and thought, "There's short-end money?"

And he understands the appeal of a hit: He had a whole lot of fun with the checks he got in the mail for Dreams of the Everyday Housewife. But he's a counterculture guy, and he's an evangelical artist who preaches the gospel of creativity.

Gantry has a publishing deal with Jim Aylward's Cool Vibe Publishing, and he regularly turns in creations that would seem to have nothing in the way of contemporary country potential. Aylward, as Beckham once did, grins at the offerings.

"He's got one called Hey Algernon, about two homeless men dying on a park bench in the cold," Aylward says. "It's a beautiful work of art."

The Pilgrim

Gantry knows what his Nashville of half a century ago was like, and he wants us to know that, too. He believes, however improbably, that a young band of guitar-wielding rebels could rise up and change things once again along Music Row. He's 70 years old now, and he believes something like this could happen in his lifetime. He prays on it sometimes, and types it out loud.

"Oh, God, I beg of you," he writes. "Send a young Turk, male or female ... someone who rips back the curtain on crap and reveals in all their blazing glory the high road to the bigger universe of our fears and dreams."

One of Kristofferson's finest songs is called The Pilgrim, Chapter 33. It was inspired by Gantry, and in it, Kristofferson writes, "He's a poet, he's a picker, he's a prophet, he's a pusher / He's a pilgrim and a preacher, and a problem when he's stoned / He's a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction / Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home."

When Kristofferson first presented Gantry with the song, Gantry was aghast.

"It was embarrassing to me because it painted a picture of a guy who was a total wreck," he says. "There are images in there of a crazy person. But I came to understand it and to be proud of it. I came to realize that everybody I hung with back then was that same person, including Kris. We were pilgrims and preachers and problems. But we didn't give up on our dreams, and we didn't sell out. We found our voices and we raised them."

Gypsy Dreamers in the Alley won't help aspiring professional songwriters wanting to learn to network, to write for the charts or to co-write with speed and accessibility. It might help folks who want affirmation that it's OK to burn for art, and who are energized by the suggestion that distinction and vulnerability are things to shoot for rather than things to brush under the rug. It can help people who start out great and want to learn how not to mess it up.

"If this world keeps right on turnin' for the better or the worse, and all he ever gets is older and around," Kristofferson sang in The Pilgrim, Chapter 33. "From the rockin' of the cradle to the rollin' of the hearse, the going up was worth the coming down."